A hundred years after the birth of Flannery O’Connor, her South, as well as the rest of America, is less “Christ-haunted,” as she once phrased it. Now, we’re Christ-neglecting, with the scandal of the cross replaced by the shock of click-bait headlines and political soap opera theatrics. Indeed, if Christ is anywhere, He’s become kitsch or worse.
The flattening of Jesus to suit the topical is emblematic of the flattening of much of life to suit the political. Only a few years ago, one of the most influential artists of our time, Lin-Manuel Miranda argued that “All art is political. In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political.” I don’t have to imagine what O’Connor would say to that, because she actually already responded, back in 1963: “The topical is poison…. A plague on everybody’s house.” Indeed, perhaps in this age of topical overdose, we should get back to reading Flannery O’Connor.
When O’Connor was in her early 20s, studying writing at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, she began jotting down her prayers in a journal. A cradle Catholic who was literally born in the shadow of a church in Savannah, O’Connor had been saying prayers all her life. But she admits in this journal to a new endeavor: that she wants “Christian principles [to] permeate [her] writing.” In one prescient line of vulnerability, she begs God, “Please help me get down under things and find where you are.” O’Connor wrote about her particular time and place—the deep South in the 1950s and ‘60s—but she did so by digging under things and pulling to the surface the truest, most lasting reality.
In this way, O’Connor’s fiction has more in common with the great artists of the past like Aeschylus or Shakespeare than her contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway or Truman Capote. Whereas these popular writers mostly wrote about politics and current events with skepticism about the human condition, her writing turns the gaze on the reader and says, “Who are you—good or evil? Human or demon? Selfless or Selfish? What have you got to say for yourself?” As the voice of her character Ruby Turpin echoes across the field in her short story “Revelation” and returns to her like the voice of God, “Who do you think you are?” It is the central question of O’Connor’s stories—and the one we all must answer.
O’Connor is not the first to do this. Around seven centuries ago, the Catholic writer Dante Alighieri’s dreams of a political career were foiled, and in the aftermath, he wrote an epic poem that seems to be about politics but actually is about the journey of a human soul toward the “Love that moves the sun and other stars.” (Dante was a politician for the winning party in a civil war, but was suddenly exiled by Pope Boniface VIII so that the latter could increase his dominion.) Many people read The Divine Comedy and expect Dante to be airing grievances about his political opponents, but then you see his enemies floating in Paradise and have to question all your assumptions. To tell the truth about the misuse of papal power or the schism between the warring parties of 14th century Italy, Dante had to go to the heart of things. His pilgrim asks a shade in Purgatory about the cause of all the problems on earth, expecting to hear about this tribe or that ideology. Instead, the enlightened shade answers, “If the present world has gone astray / in you is the cause, in you it’s to be sought … ”
O’Connor writes in this great tradition of seers, those who see past the politics to the human. Like Dante, she based the drama of her stories “on the bedrock of original sin.” Take, for instance, her first novel Wise Blood, in which an itinerant veteran founds a “Church without Christ” and preaches against the fall, sin, and redemption. In a twist, he ends up blaspheming his way toward God, becoming an ascetic by the end of the story. Indeed, like Dante, O’Connor was contemporarily relevant without losing sight of the human being—and of our true nature at the center of the story.
“Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other,” O’Connor wrote in 1955. “The writer’s value is lost, both to himself and to his country, as soon as he ceases to see that country as part of himself, and to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around.” If O’Connor ever cast a stone, it was at her own reflection.
This posture toward art stands in direct conflict with how we perceive art today—as evidenced by, ironically, the removal of O’Connor’s name from a Loyola University Maryland dormitory hall in 2020 due to alleged racism in her writing. A New Yorker piece titled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” borrowed quotations from previously unpublished letters, printing them with this incendiary question, only weeks after the unjust death of George Floyd. The country was politically charged, especially that summer, and groups at Loyola reacted to the piece on O’Connor without investigating her biography, her fiction, or even whether the claims against the author were accurate. (Spoiler: They weren’t.)
Despite protests from those of us who have actually read O’Connor, the unlearned opinion prevailed. But years earlier, cooler heads had shown us a better way to engage O’Connor: In 1975, the black writer Alice Walker visited O’Connor’s preserved Georgia home. Walker’s family had resided nearby in a shelter that was no longer standing. The discrepancy between the preserved home of the white artist and the loss of home for a black writer was a reminder of stark injustice. Walker expressed her rightful anger, but then chose to hold on to what is still good in O’Connor’s work: “But essential O’Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does, out of such a racial culture. If it can be said to be ‘about’ anything, then it is ‘about’ prophets and prophecy, ‘about’ revelation, and ‘about’ the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don’t have a chance of spiritual growth without it.”
“Who Speaks for America Today?” Life Magazine asked this question in a 1950s column, and O’Connor answered, “The advertising agencies.” Her answer today might be, “The politicians.” Please, no. Let it instead be our great writers speaking for us, to us, from the past. And for us going forward. Plato thought the ideal Republic needed poetry that taught us how to love what is beautiful. If we were to be good citizens, we needed belles lettres that helped us imagine virtue. And, of course, disdain the vices.
We may decry the loss of character in our society, but mere character development programs in education are not enough. We need fiction that says less about how to behave and more about how to submit to the truth of our own shortcomings. “The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” O’Connor writes in her essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” “and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character.” Consider how O’Connor’s characters do not discover how good they are, or like a Disney princess find their power in their own hearts, but are instead confronted with the sin within—“the devil they are possessed by,” in her words. In her story “The Artificial N—” Mr. Head (the racist egoist) changes over the story, ending his journey by “judging himself with the thoroughness of God” and seeing “that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own.” O’Connor’s stories do not tell us how to make friends and influence people, but how to realize our faults and acknowledge that we ourselves are the cause of many problems.
Because O’Connor chose to tell stories that stripped the contemporary world of its pressing immediacy, she shows us how to choose what is eternal over what is temporary. Her story “The Enduring Chill” opens with the protagonist Asbury Fox feeling “that he was about to witness a majestic transformation.” He arrives home in Georgia from New York and feels “that the flat of roofs might at any moment turn into the mounting turrets of some exotic temple for a god he didn’t know.” Then, that feeling is pushed aside by his own ego and described as a passing “illusion.” But Asbury, as a character, doesn’t end there. The story closes with “the last film of illusion … torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes.” That’s what O’Connor’s stories do—they transform us from people who can’t see to people who can. We may have begun like Asbury, with our own ego suppressing any inclination of something beyond ourselves, and then we experience an epiphanic moment in which grace reaches in and unearths itself.
When the English author Zadie Smith received the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2024, she spent her speech unpacking O’Connor’s story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” reminding us that the world is full of characters like those in the 1955 story: Mr. Shiftlet, or ogres of self-pity and sentimentalism; the elder Lucynell, “people like you and me, who barter and buy and sell and compromise and trade and cheat and do their best and sometimes their worst, but all the while thinking of themselves as pretty decent folks”; and the younger Lucynell, who are afflicted and vulnerable. We need to be reading O’Connor a hundred years after her birth because her work hasn’t aged at all. There are still Shiftlets, Lucynells, and the helpless.
Smith is merely one example of those who write in the enduring way of O’Connor, and whose work extends O’Connor’s legacy. We may also read Leif Enger. Or Phil Klay. Or Christopher Beha. Or Kirstin Valdez Quade. Of O’Connor, Smith confesses, “I never confused Flannery for a saint—as so many people did, much to her annoyance—but I knew at once that here was a dead woman of spectacular gifts, who was presently reaching beyond the grave to give to others what had been given to her.” Indeed, O’Connor was not a Catholic saint, but she writes in the tradition of the literary saints—Sophocles, Dante, and so on. “The point of intersection of the timeless/ with time, is an occupation for the saint … ” T.S. Eliot wrote in “Four Quartets.” And that was O’Connor’s occupation, finding the timeless in the time she had.
For O’Connor, not all art is political, and not even the best art is political. No, art is just dirty work—digging up what matters so that we may cling to it. “Between my finger and my thumb / the squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it,” writes Seamus Heaney. Thank God, O’Connor did the digging for us.
